The eternal question of how long your running shoes should last became suddenly topical a few months ago, when Tigst Assefa set a world marathon record in what Adidas billed as essentially a single-use marathon shoe. This development sparked some important discussions about sustainability, accessibility, and fairness. But it also served as a reminder of how little we actually know about the useful life of running shoes, especially in the new era of thick-foamed supershoes.
Fortunately, there’s some interesting new data in a study from researchers in Spain, led by Victor Rodrigo-Carranza of the University of Castilla-La Mancha. In the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, they compare shoes made with a modern superfoam to a traditional EVA midsole before and after 280 miles, and find that the new midsole does indeed lose its magic more quickly—so much so, in fact, that the supershoe is no better than the regular shoe at that point.
Before digging into the specifics of the new study, it’s worth sketching in some context. The conventional wisdom that I’ve heard throughout my running life is that…
